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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

ARM Servers Begin to Appear

Almost the entire server market today comes down to two basic types: First there are the industry standard servers, powered by x86 chips from Intel and AMD (typically Xeon and Opteron). Then there are the big "scale-up" computers, the descendants of the mainframes and minicomputer, such as IBM's Z-Series' power CPUs, Oracle and Fujitsu with their Sparc CPUs, and HP's Itanium. The x86 cores have gotten much more powerful over the years, but the "big iron" CPUs tend to be bigger, more capable, and more expensive.

But for the past couple of years, we've been hearing about the concept of "microservers"—using less powerful but more energy-efficient CPUs and cores for applications where raw horsepower isn't key. Many of these concepts involve processors based on cores from ARM, the same kind used in the chips that make mobile phones. I've written about this before but in the past week, I've seen a number of announcements and demos at the Computex show that indicate such servers are getting closer to reality.

Late last year, HP announced it is working on such a concept, which it dubbed Project Moonshot. AMD recently acquired microserver vendor Seamicro (which initially focused on Atom-based servers), but now ARM-based servers are getting a variety of new entrants.

Last week, Dell announced that it is shipping a prototype ARM-based server known as "Copper," based on a 1.6 GHz quad-core Marvell XP CPU. This is a 3U server with up to 48 CPUs, designed with 12 "sleds" (or boards) with four CPUs each. Dell said this is being delivered to seed customers, but isn't generally available.

At Computex, Marvell showed off the boards for this project, which look quite compact.

ARM displayed a similar concept from original design manufacturer (ODM) Mitac, with a server it calls "Getafix." This is a 4U unit, designed with eight CPU modules (which it calls Asterix), each of which can have eight of the Marvell quad-core CPUs, meaning the total system can have 64 CPUs and 256 cores, yet will only have a total power draw of 850 watts. It is also designed to hold 2.5-inch SAS, SATA, or SSD drives, with 10Gb connectivity. Initially, it will run Canonical's Ubuntu server.

In addition, ARM showed off Calxeda's upcoming EnergyCard solution. This uses modules with four of Calxeda's new EnergyCore processors, which are quad-core chips based on the ARM Cortex A9 architecture, with the company's proprietary fabric for connecting the chips.

A prototype server had 12 such cards in a rack server.

Because the ARM cores to date are only 32-bit, they aren't suited for highly processor-intensive workloads, but ARM points out that small, efficient cores should be particularly good for input/output-intensive applications, such as Web servers.

And the ARM ecosystem is getting more powerful. Later this year, we should be seeing the first processors based on the Cortex A15, designed for a 40-bit address space, higher throughput, and better coherency, so a chip could have up to 16 cores. Last year, ARM announced a 64-bit architecture, although not yet the specific cores (so products are at least a couple of years away).

Other companies are said to be working on ARM-based server chips as well. Nvidia took an architectural license and said it is working on what it called "Project Denver." Applied Micro has said it is working on a 64-bit design, based on its architectural license. Texas Instruments has also been linked to this space.

It remains to be seen how big the market for such microservers will be, but the concept is certainly fascinating. I'll be looking forward to seeing more.

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